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This week we looked at GPS which stands for Global Positioning System. The idea behind GPS is based on time and the position of a network of satellites. The satellites have very accurate clocks and the satellite locations are known with great precision.

Each GPS satellite continuously transmits a radio signal containing the current time and data about its position. The time delay between when the satellite transmits a signal and the receiver receives it is proportional to the distance from the satellite to the receiver. A GPS receiver monitors multiple satellites and uses their locations and the time it takes for the signals to reach it to determine its location . At a minimum, four satellites must be in view of the receiver for it to get a location fix.

We used the Adafruit Ultimate GPS Breakout connected to an Arduino as our GPS receiver. It’s very easy to set up, all we did was install the Adafruit GPS library on our Arduino and this gave us a load of programmes to chose from. We used the parsing sketch which gave us Longitude, Latitude and our location in degrees which we used with google maps to show our location.

I was away this week so Dave led the group, they did a couple of Arduino projects. They revisited the traffic lights from December but this time used the Arduino to control them and then moved on to a temperature and humidity sensor called the DHT11.

Here is the wiring diagram for the traffic lights and you can find the code here.

Here is the wiring diagram for the DHT11 and the code is also on Dropbox here.

We will be doing more with the Arduino particularly for some of our projects.

This week we continued working on our Astro Pi entries and we also looked at FreeCAD and Fritzing which are tools that will help us with building our projects.

FreeCAD, available for download from here, is used for 3D modelling and allows us design very complicated things from simple 3D shapes such as cubes and cylinders. Here are a couple of quick videos to get you started.

Then we looked at Fritzing, download from here, an application for drawing very easy to understand circuits, here’s how to draw a simple circuit using it.

Dave will be leading next Saturday’s session and I will see you again on the ninth of Feb.

This week we started looking at physical computing and the Raspberry Pi. This involves attaching various components such as sensors, motors or controllers to the GPIO pins on our Pi. This week we connected a LED and two buttons, and we used the GPIO Zero module for Python to control them. I’ve made a video, it’s a little bit long, that covers everything from Saturday’s session.

At the end of the session the group started working on a traffic light idea and we will combine this with HC-SR04 ultrasonic distance sensor next week to create a measuring device.

We started of this week’s session by looking at the recent Soyuz rocket launch which was to send two people to the ISS. During the launch one of the booster rockets failed and the launch had to be aborted. Both crew members, astronaut Nick Hague and cosmonaut Aleksey Ovchinin, escaped without injuries.

In the Bodgers group, we’ve been working on code for the International Space Station. To do this we are using on online Sense Hat emulator, the Sense Hat is a special piece of hardware designed to be deployed with a Raspberry Pi on the ISS.

Hello again everybody.
This week in the Bodgers group we started working on our code for the Mission Zero Challenge.

We began by writing a simple text message on the 8×8 full-colour LED display, then we changed the text and background colours. We then coded a picture by assigning a colour to each of the 64 LEDs on the display. We finished the session by taking a quick look at using the temperature sensor to read the temperature. Here are my slides from this week day 2.
Next week we will recap what we covered this week and we will start to personalise our code for the challenge.

In the meantime, here’s a couple of fun videos on how the Astro Pi computers got to the ISS.

This week we got things off to a flying start with Bodgers Bingo where the Bodgers had to look out for various phrases as I went through a very long slideshow that introduced them to what we do in the Bodgers group, it went very well with lots of Starburst and Chewits for everyone. My slides are here Day 1 (PDF).

We are going to start of the year by working on the Astro Pi Mission Zero Challenge in which the Bodgers will use a Raspberry Pi Sense Hat to write a greeting and display the temperature inside the International Space Station to the astronauts on the ISS. Here are the guidelines for Mission Zero Astro_Pi_Mission_Zero_Guidelines_2018_19 (PDF).

If you’re interested in buying a Raspberry Pi I’d recommend the following sites:

As you may remember from before Christmas Kevin, Zack and Barry won a prize in the Raspberry Pi Pioneers competition, part of that prize was an invitation to Coolest Projects UK which was held in London last Saturday.

The first thing that struck us when we got there was how small the event was, there was about forty projects there, compared to Coolest Projects in the RDS. However this is the first time that Coolest Projects has been run in the UK so it’s a very good start. We also noticed that at least half the projects were hardware based which reflects the fact that there are more Raspberry Jams etc. than CoderDojos in the UK.

The day started with us setting up our “Piggy In The Middle” project, followed by a very nice speech by Philip Colligan. The lads then demoed their project to the public while they were waiting for the Judges. After the judging was finished there were science shows by Greg Foot and Neil Monteiro as well as stands to keep the kids entertained, Zack and Kevin really enjoyed the huge version of Connect 4 that was there. In what has now become Coolest Projects tradition for Kevin and Zack they had their picture taken again with Philip Colligan CEO of the Raspberry Pi Foundation.

Then it was time for the results, the Mobile category award went to Meriem Ait Ziane for her app of healthy eating recipes and advice as well as support for diabetic people and a personalized diet plan according to your health conditions.

The Games category was won by Hamdan Syed and Amiyan Ezdi. The game they coded is called Calorie Challenge, which challenges you to remember the amount of calories in each meal/snack.

The Website award went to George Hart for his project called “Educelevate”. He designed the website to educate children of all ages on various topics.

The Scratch category was won by to Gabriella Jenkins and Liya John for their game “Toad Ahoy”.

The Hardware category went to Avye Couloute for her project: Voice O’tronik Bot. We were all very impressed by both Avye and her project and were delighted to see her win.